Free-to-Play's MECHANICS are Great - The Mini-Game Revolution - Extra Credits
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- Опубликовано: 3 окт 2024
- Free-to-Play mechanics bring persistence and progress to simple game systems, only to slam players into a frustrating paywall. But replace real money with in-game money that every player earns by enjoying the main single player game, and suddenly the same mechanics that make free-to-play so maddening become the foundation for a memorable and even beloved mini-game like Gwent or Blitzball.
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Absolutely lost my shit at lord Gaben running away on the count of 3
Good on ya Scott, you got me
Time?
4:46
Oh yeah, Had to pause and play at least 3 or 4 more times that segment to get what was the three problems haha
Yeah Scott, good one. Now update your damn web-comic.
friggen hilarious
This video made me realize that I haven't seen a minigame in a AAA game in a while, and that makes me sad. I hope that Gwent does well, because it might make developers try something similar.
The weirdest minigame I can think of was in System Shock 2. You could find a handheld console thing called a "game pig" and load games into it as you found them, or if you had the highest level hacking skill you could hack it to unlock all of them. You had tic-tac-toe, frogger, minesweeper, and I shit you not there was even a very simple open-world RPG. It was really fun to play those while you were hiding in a corner waiting for the security system to deactivate.
Uhh...Fallout 4?
That. And also GTAV (and all 3D GTAs as far as I know, but it's the new one that matters), Bioshock Infinite, Uncharted 4. I'm sure there's more. Though these are more like homage than F2P applications in singleplayer.
And going before that, there was Caravan in Fallout: New Vegas. Too bad I was never good at Blackjack to begin with. Or more accurately, never played it before.
TheAwakeOrangutang Just max out your Luck and lol at the blackjack winnings
Spairus Marek Bioshock Infinite had a minigame? Where? What was it?
"A Waste of Time" as well as "One... Two... Three..." = Incredible. Those were some of their funniest visuals ever! LOL
2:41 I laughed way too hard
Kings quest levels of bad puns.
graphics were pretty lulzy all around for this episode
I don't get it. What was so funny about "shallow water"? Please explain to me! (Not a native english speaker)
Oooooooooh! Ha! Many Thanks.
in short; gwent is pay to win for the character not the player. therefore your "job" to earn "money" is to play the game. I'd love a job which was ridding a horse to kill monsters to feed my tcg addiction xD
Now stop for a second and think about it carefully. Would you REALLY?
YES
more people than you'd think would probably do that if it was a real thing.
Ranchers will pay people to go out and kill cougars and coyotes for them and there are people who make enough from doing that to make it their main source of income. Who says you can't do that on horseback?
+ShadowWolfRising well at least it would be a good way to deal with overpopulation
5:05 that has to be, the cutest cube. *I have ever seen.*
Extra Credits will be on hiatus next week, but don't worry! In its place, we'll have a five-day-long special series whose title starts with "Design" and ends with "Club." WHAT COULD IT BE?
IT RETURNS.
DESIGN UNICORN RAINBOW PRINCESS CLUB?????
Designer Jeans and their place in Night Clubs?
I cant believe. FINALLY!
Wait a sec, 9 hours ago?! this video is just 18 minutes old!
Design extra credits is the best learning resource for games no doubt about it club?
As an avid TF2 player, 3:18 cracked me up.
Free to Play mechanics work brilliantly as mini games (so long as you don't have to pay money).
how about free to play mechanics can be great
Actually I played Witcher 3 and I don't remember to be spending a lot of money buying good cards. Most of the time for get good cards I had to win some duels or look for every merchant in the world to be able to find someone who sells cards (it was harder to find the merchant than to buy the card).
It's interesting the idea exposed on this video, but I don't think it's the case of Gwent, unless an update of Witcher 3 had changed drastically the way to get the cards.
When I saw 'Blitzball' I thought it was the recent 'Blastball' in the newest metroid game, which is actually free from the nintendo E-Shop along with being the download play option
Would these mechanics work with pokemon go style mechanics, finding stuff in the real world to trade in for in game currency which can be used to bolster the players mini game free to play deck.
Really love the mini-animations in this episode - but also found it distracted from what was said and I found I'd lost the train of thought by the time those animation had finished.
one thing I noticed that made gwent fun was, even though it was "pay to win" because you had to buy better cards, it never felt that way, partially because the NPC decks get better as you play, but because the cards you could buy are spread out around the world so much ( maybe you could buy an average of one to two good new cards per town) it wasn't like traditional free to play where you just throw money at the machine and you are suddenly much stronger than everyone else. in the Witcher you had to explore the world and find better cards just to keep up with everyone else
This reminds me a lot of chao gardens in the sonic adventure games. They were kind of like mini-games, where you never had to visit one, and nothing ever even really asked you to visit one. But they added tons of persistence to the main games, because replaying main stages could earn you more gifts for your chao.
The art in this episode is great. Variety, visual gags, katamari damaci references, mini-animation...
Very very nice.
Incredible points aside, there are two main things I loved about the aesthetics of this video:
1. The new random use of little animations is a really great way to add some pop to the video and also looks incredible and professional.
2. The representation of Mini-game is FREAKING ADORABLE
the mini game box was adorable
I just love how they announced the Gwent standalone game at E3. "We gave you an entire open world to explore, and you spent hours in a tavern playing a card game!"
Step 1. EA see's this video. Thinks it is a good idea and integrates it
Step 2. EA adjusts this idea so it fits in with their corporate model and makes it real life money instead of game money
Step 3. EA profits
yes
Step 5: Everyone keeps buying EA games anyway for some reason.
As was Dragon Age Inquisition's mp, exact same model with slightly better gameplay.
Haan22 At least Dragon Age Inquisition's MP didn't affect its SP, except for the bullshit dragon throne thing. ME3 though...
Ugh, I know.
OMIGAWD HOW CUTE IS THE MINIGAME PUT THAT THING ON A MUG INSTEAD
I WANT TO HUG MY SCREEN RIGHT NOW
YESSS or like a tiny little figurine that's what I was thinking ^u^
I wanted to comment something like that, well 2 hours late. Have my thumbs up! IT'S SO CUUUUUUTE!!!!!
Minigame on a coffee mug? Think it would fit better on a teacup
A Game tea set. That would be an interesting business venture.
This makes me think of the Chao Gardens from Sonic Adventure 1 & 2. Man I wish they would bring those back. I'd buy a straight up Chao Garden game if it existed.
I remember playing rock paper scissors all into the night just to get my little dudes to perform better. I thought that was a very well designed mini game.
I was going to comment something like this. Yes, I feel like the Chao Gardens were exactly this, and they worked so well because they were exactly this.
I feel like the chao garden was the actual game everyone was playing, and the sonic stages were the real minigame there.
Wtf is a Wohde lol, I wouldn't say that XD At least not for me ;P But It was indeed a game that took up many hours collecting rings, and animals, and those power thingies in the main stages ;P
a.k.a. Pay-2-Win Games Are Just PS2 JRPG Mini-Games Asking for Your Real-Life Money.
Still remember sinking tons of hours into Dragon Quest 8 just for it's Pokemon-esque mini-game where you had to fight and recruit special monsters you could see in the world and use them to compete in an arena for other in-game items.
The best part about that one mini-game: you could actually call upon those same monsters in battle to fight for you. It was great using my Monster Squad to help fight against the final boss.
I would love to see a standalone blitzball game but obviously more fleshed out and balanced. I loved that minigame as a kid.
3:17 Thats one beautiful scout with a Dr.Dappers
The FF9 card game is still my favorite mini game. I spent so much time traveling around FF9's world looking for the NPCs with the unique cards.
That had an additional layer of permanence too since your cards could level up!
I believe 8 had the same one, but a ridiculous questline for it as well
+guyinthecorner
No, 8's was completely different. 8's game is Triple Triad, a 3x3
grid with consistent cards that only interact in 4 directions. 9 had
Tetra Master, a 4x4 grid with cards that had more RPG style stats that
interacted in 0 to 8 directions. In Tetra Master, card stats were
numbers like: 3P26. In this example card, it has 3 attack power, deals
physical damage, has 2 physical defense, and 6 magic defense. If you
used the card to take other cards enough, any of these stats could
improve, including the attack type
Triple Triad can also be played in FFXIV, and you can get cards from completing dungeons. also, those minions you can have follow you around can also be used in another minigame
Bravo to the Animator this week, who added a lot of little things that were awesome. I noticed!
"Free-to-Play Mechanics Work, but Not With Real Money"
Ok so today I finished a marathon of Extra Credits videos from the start of season one until now in under two months. I've watched every single Extra Credits episode, bought some titles you recommended and put more of those on my wishlist. Even though I never created a game by myself I learned a lot. I actually never used the thumbs up that often in my entire youtube history. You guys kept me entertained and sticking to gaming theories and even the political and economic topics were worthwile. The pictures used to help state your points are well chosen and kept me watching instead of just hearing youtube. Over the last 300 episodes you made me laughing and thinking a lot. Thank you for that. I'm proud to be a gamer today. You are enriching a lot of lifes and minds with this series.
Unfortunately, big companies tend to actually take the worst aspects of F2P games when making their own versions. I'm not sure if it's because of a lack of faith in the playerbase so they *need* to make them feel like they have to pay money to do anything, or just the fact that making games like that has proven to be more profitable in the short term. Whatever the case, big companies just keep getting worse and worse with it...to the point of integrating these microtransaction P2W mechanics into pure singleplayer games...and it doesn't show any sign of slowing down or changing in the near future.
The truth is, it makes them more money, and money is all that matters in a capitalist economy. Sure, you will get the occasional game that was so good that it made money (undertale, early versions of angry birds) but that's rare, and low chance of success is risky. Thus, companies will continue to make bad games that sell well until the playerbase gets fed up with it (which, as we've seen with candy crush, takes a long time...)
I'd hardly call that a failing of capitalism. Really good games consistently sell well within their niche--the whole reason it's rare to see a good game sell really well is simply because good games are rare. Most games are crap, AAA or not.
And I don't think it's fair to say that publishers just plan to churn out bad games-it's important to note that people only spend money on something if they're convinced that they want it, so publishers make games that line up with what people think they want. The reason bad shit gets popular is the same as in Hollywood-most people simply don't look at media beyond the surface level. What people really want is a carefully crafted, tightly designed experience, but they don't really understand how to evaluate that, so they focus on broad aspects that have little, if any, bearing on a work's quality-"Ooh, I like open world games." "This comedy has a lot of celebrities, it'll be really funny."
Dagda Mor
And I agree, that is part of the problem. Most games that try to be good actually aren't, which is why trying to make an actually-good game is hard, and even harder to get through publishers. Sure kickstarter can fix this, but it can fail like mighty no. -2- 9. As for people not looking deeply enough into media, we don't know what we want, but we can *easily* recognise what we don't want. So, games that try to be good but actually suck quickly lose their niche. On the other hand AAA games that suck often receive their money and make some profit before people realise they suck (and by that point, they've already bought...) Hence why bad practices are often repeated!
Small companies also use the f2p aspect poorly
*cough* EA *cough*
The art for this episode has to be the best you've done. A+
That feeling of achievement and accomplishment by acquire items is a hard thing to balance well.
Good on Gwent being a brilliantly designed example by an amazingly awesome studio.
I'm a simple man, I see geralt playing gwent, I click
Not really related to this episode but still awsome about Gwent, it taught the player a lot more about the Witcher's world. The characters you played against and the troops of cards were a dive into the lore, espacially the war part, without having to read thru enemie discription or other non game activity but instead by providing a relaxing aspect of the greater game.
Lil' Game is friggin adorable.
The visual gags in this episode were top notch!
one mini game I sunk unholy amounts of hours into was the chao's in sonic adventure 2, I loved those cute little bastards and nailing every trick on levels while collecting glow sticks/rings to make them stronger was just sweet icing on the sugary cake.
I'm starting a games design course in September and just found this channel. This is all going to be so helpful!
Oh come one guys, you can't tell me you didn't love dodging 200 lighting strikes for a little stuff knight!
Oh god... the PTSD is coming back...
I remember unlocking everyone's ultimate weapon with the exception of Lulu's until I bought a gameshark! I will agree that was bad game design.
Oh please. Dodging 200 lightning strikes in a row was tedious, but not difficult.
Trying to steer a Chocobo that handled like a tank through swarms of laser-guided seagulls? Now that was the real nightmare.
+I'm Very Angry It's Not Butter please! after an hour I completed that quest and got that Sun Sigil
Nah, after 30 minutes you were done.
For a while I was playing a disgustingly Pay to Win app game called "Cutie Riot", which is quite obviously one of those terrible money sinks that want to take as many thousands of dollars from their users as possible, but there was one aspect about it that kept me playing as a free player for about a good 8 months.
I was able to keep up.
By putting in the effort to hit the constant daily events, figure out strategies for team compositions, and then understand the game on a level that let me see black and white decisions where everyone else saw them in greyscale (for resource management and whatnot), I was able to pool together the paltry daily allotted resources a free player was allotted and create a team that stayed in the top 20 in the arena even after 3 servers were merged (with all the paying players merging with them, making this quite the achievement. It was a direct PvP thing where you could take someone's place by defeating their defense team in a fight, so in order to stay ranked you had to be able to have the auto mode hold off someone using their team to their fullest.)
I was able to do all that versus hundreds of players that were at least vip7, several vip10 ($500-$1000+ sunk in the game) because I understood the game's mechanics and where and where - NOT - to waste gems, the premium currency, which there was surprisingly a large amount of that was available to every player by default anyway. Dailies and weeklies could add up to being worth over 1000-1500 gems in a month or more if you were lucky/slippery enough to get the chests first before the rest of the server, and this is in a system where $1 is 60 gems.
However it should be noted that of the thousands of players playing the game, I think there were only one or two players like me that weren't - me -, simply because the systems that you had to understand for every facet of the game in order to get to this point were poorly translated, convoluted, and overall just ridiculously high entry level and whatnot.
This added on top of the fact that the devs purposefully put in stupidly gem inefficient gem sinks that would either be just that or completely actually worthless but would be something you would buy "in the heat of the moment", the system was brutal and drained everyone of their resources and prevented forward progression without heavy gem expenditure or knowing exactly where to put your resources like I did.
I think what I'm getting at is that there's something seriously attractive in the idea of being able to beat someone who's seriously tipped the scales in their favor by using p2w methods without p2w'ing yourself by simply being much better at the game. However, creating such a system requires that you effectively make sacrifices of the majority of your playerbase to whittle out the few who can actually achieve such a status, and since they're f2p, your game isn't making any money off of them, so I don't think that it's something that you can design a game around...but hey, if you guys have some thoughts to put in on this, please do respond.
I'd also like to note that they had a lot of "cross server" events which pits every player on every server against every other player on every other server, meaning that I ended up fighting not just my own local whales, but the largest whales in the entire game's community. This ended up creating a strange dynamic among our own server as there was a tactical event that they added where everything was done in a large real-time scale which I feel like added something that made the game pretty fun as an actual game, as if you could organize actual players to get together and attack an enemy fortress in the right order with the right troops, you could defeat even the strongest of pay to win players. This meant that for a while we had a huge team of around 90 people we had organizing to take resources on a cross-server war map, and I had a lot of fun leading many pay-to-win whales (even the largest whale on the server who had over $16k in the game) to take a huge amount of territory. They only listened to me because of the level of knowledge I showed in the game and that it lead us to be one of the largest forces in the game and earned us a great amount of resources.
We were able to hold our own against players many times stronger than us because we were more organized and understood the systems better, which felt amazing despite the fact that we all knew we were playing a scummy game.
Seeing this video, it makes me curious as to whether or not recreating such a game in a less predatory manner would be possible, but the game was only fun for me and those who followed me because it WAS predatory and I was circling around that and still being a top player as a "freeter" anyway.
I love Gwent from a design perspective. Not only for the reasons listed in the video, I also like it for two other reasons.
It made NPCs unique. I mean, there are several people in the game with names who play Gwent, but there are also lots of innkeepers and merchants who would look as repetitions. But when you play Gwent against them, and they have a different deck than the other innkeeper who worked in an inn totally like this one, you feel them as different.
In addition to that, it was an incredibly good representation of leisure. I liked to think of my own Geralt, coming to a place, buy a drink or two (or three), and play Gwent against anyone there who wanted, relaxing from the hard work of travelling the land and fighting monsters.
Anyone ever play Alien Hominid? Of those that have, remember the PDA Games minigame? That was one of the best minigames I've ever played. Hell, I only played the actual game of Alien Hominid once or twice total - PDA Games was that damn good.
As always, good episode of Extra Credits. Thanks, guys.
A lot of my time in Fallout New Vegas was spent playing caravan.
They also had blackjack, roulette and slot machines, but caravan was the one fun where you could actually make good money in little time.
Omg, the puns, the jokes, the animation. It's so beautiful. xD
I had a revelation in Gwent when I learned I could steal an opponent's spy with a decoy card. Also the artwork of the gwent cards is just nice to look at.
+100 to those edits and +1000 to the editor of the videos
that "selling loot" drawing cracks me up.
I loooove FF8's Triple Triad, not only because at first, getting the stronger card was a great boost and achievement to the gameplay. But as rules are added up, the strenght of the card mattered far less and low level cards were becoming just as valuable. I remember putting the game in just to play this mini game.
steambot chronicles´minigames were marvelous for me. The music instrument one, the stock market, the battle bot tournaments, they gave me roughly 100+ extra hours of play
I really like the new increase in animations in your videos! It really makes them feel a bit more alive.
That minigame character is adorable. Here's hoping we can get a keychain plush of that someday!
The title should be "A look on P2W mechanics as an minigame" would have been better
Or, to make it snappier, "Pay 2 Win MECHANICS work great as minigames!"
or... P2W MECHANICS IN MINIGAMES.[GONE WRONG](GONE SEXUAL!!1!)
+EdgyAsFck IN THE HOOD
I know you have done this before, but the comedy added thruogh visual to emphazise the idea being commented was actually pretty good this time. Keep it going.
This video gave me PTSD flashbacks to the Chocobo minigame you have to play to get Tidus's ultimate weapon... I was obsessed with that and it took me HOURS.
It's been a great many years and my memory has faded, but I do remember a game where you could play games on an arcade machine, and I ended up just playing those arcade games more than the actual game, despite no benefit to the larger game itself...
There's another example of a great mini-game that was so good, it almost dwarfed the main game and is the reason that so many flaws within the main game are ignored and the game is considered a classic: Sonic Adventure 2's Chao Garden. It fits every criteria you just mentioned. You get resources for it by playing the main game, and can even change up how you play the main game in order to get resources for it. There's a lot of persistence as you increase your Chao's stats in order to compete in harder races (or karate in the GC version), there's a fair bit of strategy in raising Chao, largely around evolving into certain types and breeding them, and technically was entirely optional to the main game. The main issue with it is that you'll probably blaze through all the other content within SA2 well before you've finished all the "main" Chao garden content, although it is the reason I continue to play SA2 after over 10 years of owning the game.
I was thinking about it, and having some of the minigames that run off ingame currency like these in some mmorpgs would probably be beneficial. And if set up properly, it might be conducive to making areas be more flexible in level ranges than a majority of mmos tend to be. A way to do that might be to have certain areas be the locations you acquire some things for the minigame(s), but some of the obtainable loot is only later in the game after progressing down the story path that changes the areas to an extent that feels new to the player but is similar enough to not require an entire rework of the area. Just some springboard idea.
loved the animated illustrations on this one
4:40
This distract me more than it should be. The anticipation of 3 is very real.
This is, visually, one of the best episodes! The artist was on point the entire time!
I was skeptical, but yeah, you got me. A side note, I enjoy things like ftp models using in game currency because it doesn't break my immersion. It's my character earning that money and gambling it away.
That Gabe drawing was great.
The square cube mini game character is frickin cute man!!
I got the Fiber Fix commerical. Love it!
OMG that mini version of Game made me laugh so much! I was like d'aww it's adorable and then it went BLEGHH with all the money. LOL
I think it'd be interesting if the minigames existed in its game's universe in the context of a F2P/P2W game, like as a phone game in something like GTA or Watch_Dogs.
Also, I haven't had a good chuckle at a "GabeN can't count to 3" joke in a while, but this one got me. Good job, Extra credits.
The entire Monster Hunter series is built on this idea of persistence! Instead of levels, progression is done by taking the monster materials obtained from hunts (the core gameplay) to craft weapons and armors so you can attempt more difficult hunts (leading to more core gameplay), or to provide advantages against certain monsters, giving you a very tangible feeling of getting stronger. And don't forget that as you progress it also becomes easier to mass produce consumables, which lead to additional strategic choices (do I spend time, money, and effort into using traps? what about temporary buffs? etc).
The song at the end was really good!
3:41 This. Especially the lightning one.
This is one of the reasons that I'm excited for _Super Dragon Ball Heroes: World Mission_ . It's a preemium game that's mostly single-player, but its gacha-style summoning, character collecting, team building, and quick matches remind me of free-to-play games like _Fire Emblem Heroes_ . The great thing about _World Mission_ is that it has no microtransactions. Players earn the currency used to unlock cards through gameplay only. That means you play to unlock cards to find new ways to play the game. It seems like a way to experience the fun and satisfaction of gacha games without the risk of wasting real money on random drops.
Instructions not clear, tiny green block drowned 3 staff members in money.
loves the sneaky (snarky?) Valve reference towards the end. I saw what ya did there.
Visual humor in this episode was on point! XD
This actually reminds me of Kingdom Hearts' mobile game, Unchained X. It's something of a play-to-win/grindy hybrid. There are 400-some odd quests (and they consistently add more), and every few quests you get thirty jewels -- an in-game currency you can purchase... or you can just play and play and save your jewels up. As well, you get a daily jewel bonus for logging in and every few weeks they have a campaign where you can earn even more. It's a big motivator for playing the game every day and while it's not a perfect mechanic, it's pretty balanced. With just a pinch of patience you can easily accumulate enough jewels to feel like your time was well-spent, and almost like you cheated the system by not needing to spend actual money to get the same reward as someone who did. But then, too, there is the option of purchasing jewels which becomes a source of revenue for the developers... It's quite well done :D!
2:36 mini game plushie confirmed, I need one that can just sit on my desk
Futurerama Game of Drones would work great for this. Its a FTP (4 match) and you can earn money in game to buy extra cards to finish sets to get either more cards/money/power-ups or skins. You can buys packs/extras to gain cards faster with real money, but they don't push it or even try.
The opening joke made me laugh out loud. Really good video, as well.
So many moving images. It caught me by surprise.
My new favorite intro. Haha! "Here we are"
I can't roast you for clickbait since you came clean from the very start of the video.
For that, I salute you.
Haven't played Witcher 3 or Gwent yet, but Triple Triad from Final Fantasy 8 seems to have been designed/integrated similarly, and is by far my favorite minigame to date.
To this day, my favourite mini game has been Curling in Digimon world. God I miss those days.
I like the activities in Saints Row for the way they made them feel worth it because it gives you perks like a bit more damage, longer sprinting, more ammo and so on
Ah, I love those occasionall callbacks to FFX, like little breaths of oxygen to me.
Anyone remember the card game in Digimon World 3?
I do. And the Golden Club (that was the name? idk).
And the standalone game was so much fun (Digital Card battle)
I was thinking about this too. But, yeah, the standalone game was sooooo fun.
There is a game only of it
Digimon card battle
Who doesn't? At a certain point of the game, me and my friend focused more on this minigame than the main game!
I rremember having spent many hours on that secret card-battle island. I also remember that it was a very simple and pretty luck-dependant but actually really fun game.
And for a minute there I got my hopes up and thought I had somehow missed an announcement showing a new game on Blitzball.
I want a Blitzball game!
I love Gwent with burning, burning passion. It was kinda annoying to procure some of those cards though, but so awesome once I finally found them all :D
Giving people an in-game money sink that's fun to play also deals nicely with the all-too-common problem of players winding up with way more gold or funbux than they know what to do with.
I actually didn't like Gwent because it was pay-to-win. It took away a lot of depth that game could actually have and shallowed deckbuilding to "slap the strongest cards you have in there", which might be ok for the average player but as someone who's played his share of card games it was pretty boring. But perhaps the biggest offender was the Nilfgaardian noble you meet pretty early on in the game- he's basically unbeatable at that stage, which felt exceptionally annoying to me.
AAAAAH this video has my favorite animations of Game thus far. Adorable and funny
The part about gwent reminded my of Digimon world 2003 on the Ps1 - good times :D
If I had the time I'd start playing the witcher now...
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You forgot the other reason that this pay to win model works as a minigame in the witcher 3, it's singleplayer just like in fallout shelter the pay to win aspect doesn't end up feeling frustrating because you aren't on the receiving end of it so it ends up just enhancing the game.
to prove that, we need an MMORPG with a minigame with persistence, such as if hearthstone was a minigame in WoW instead of a separate game, or sabacc was in SWTOR
A good example of this concept in motion is System Crash, a cyberpunk CCG on Steam that lacks microtransactions, favoring the pay once own the game model
I'm gonna recommend you try the Gold Saucer in FFXIV: Realm Reborn. It's a mini game area that has its own trading card game as well as other games to loose yourself in for hours. It even has its own unique set of equipment to win.
did you guys talk to Alyson lately? (god i hope i didn't butcher her name) i kinda miss her.
This is interesting because for a long time I've thought it should be STANDARD that anything you can buy with out-game currency, you can eventually buy with in-game currency -- so the difference ought to be that the players who spend money get things FASTER, not that they have a much wider variety of things to get. When I played Kingdom of Loathing regularly, when I returned to it time and again after months doing other things, I loved the fact that any item I wanted, I was capable of getting IF I put time and energy into playing the game enough to get it. (Having a cap on my ability to play during the day was helpful for my addictive personality, so I didn't spend too many hours on this pursuit on any given day.)
Eventually I paid them close to a hundred dollars, all told, because I so enjoyed the freedom to get games with in-game money (bought from players who spent out-game money, through the in-game market) that it felt good to support the game's development and hand over ten or twenty bucks in a month to get an item without having to grind for it. And I figure I've spent way more than that in a month on other stuff, let alone subscription content, so I don't at all feel bad for having put that much into the game over a couple of years.
Being able to use in-game money to buy any item you want -- eventually -- is one of those key factors that says "You guys respect the players and aren't just trying to suck money out of our wallets."
3:17 , damn !!! an unusuall strange australium !
A nice way to implement all this you guys said is to make a cyclical p2w in the game. Imagine this, you're playing an RPG and spent a long time grinding, so you can finally have a lot of money to spend on the minigame, and, suppose there is a little tournament on this minigame. You can play a tournament, which, if you win, you get better equip or something like that, that would be, otherwise, unavailable for you to have. In this case, grinding on the game help grinding on the minigame, and, grinding on the minigame helps on the game. This would give the players a nice motivation to play those minigames.
You made a point here ! It remembers me of triple triad in final fantasy 8 too. I spent the same time playing it as playing the main game !
is this the most animated extra credit Episode yet ????
fantastic ep as always ...
can you please make an episode focusing on how to focus on doing free to play monetization right ??
Dunno about anyone else but Sphere Break from FFX-2 was the best minigame ever imo. Beating Shinra for 300 quota in 20 turns was hard at first and then I remember destroying him using multiplier and coin count echos! That game was the shit!
Triple. Goddamn. Triad.
I have replayed Final Fantasy VIII just to play that damn game. It's better than the MAIN game.
That mini-game character is supercute.
Okay now i really need an extra history series about the history of game design so they can use that photo again
That minigame looked SO CUTE!!!
It felt soooooo good when you beat a tough opponent in Gwent. Almost moreso than a tough monster boss! It's like chess with cards, and that felt like I beat a chess master. If Gwent takes off you can bet I will be right up there trying to get them.
One minor complaint about the Gwent AI is that a "meta" emerged for me in how to beat them, but then that probably cause I was stuck with the Northern Realms deck for waaaaay too long.
Finny you put this today as EVE online just announced it's free plan.